That freshly asphalted road The sparkling granite lobby The towering buildings Flyovers, runways, edifices, Proclamations of success, Marking territory Asserting dominance. These were mountains once, And grasslands and forests That birthed, nurtured and nourished Generations of life Now consigned to oblivion In the victorious mausoleums Of these deathscapes.

Ignore the details of that picture. It’s some representation of the complexity of our economic system across the world. It includes our consumption, our work, our choices, our actions at various levels — individually, as organizations, countries, etc. I was born in a certain network in 1974. There were a…

Most of human civilisation and individual quests could be said to be built around the desire for ever more predictability and control over outcomes. For starters, it’s a spectrum and there’s no complete, true predictability of every variable possible in the human realm. Then there’s a point where the hidden costs actually add to the reverse of this — and there’s diminishing returns. Climate change was caused by many such costs adding up across people, places and time, and has brought upon us unpredictability much larger than the species has likely ever faced as a whole.

I read a story about the planet dying, even more than I thought it was. I read about microplastics in the kids’ bloodstream. I read about the imminent starvation, the food crises brewing. I read about the madness we call the economy. Then I check the value of my investments, Track the peak of the Sensex. I check into the evening flight home From the just-firm-enough bed of the hotel I checked into

The perfectly finished coat of paint On the car that can do a gazillion things And even now talk to you Because people won’t The ever thinner bezel on the even faster phone Pushing ever faster G-speeds That your zoom calls struggle to keep up with The perfectly laid tiles And fresh coats of paint on the walls And neatly arranged flawless furniture And yes, designer tableware! No warts No Blemishes None of that ugliness Or uncertainty and chaos Of a world falling apart Of dying soils, air, species, hopes, Or the pressure of a sense of responsibility, The weight that being a custodian brings Seeps into the perfectly assembled mirage of your everyday The illusion of the comfort zone lives on For one more day For now

As I go about “everyday”, responding to mails, setting up meetings, trying to get small wins, planning things, reviewing our portfolio with our advisor, hoping to convince more people about better tradeoffs that might help slow this train to the end of the world down, I often feel like the man doing the dance when it all starts to end. And then I look around, and see the dance at scale, and there’s not even the acknowledgement the man finally had. Our huge, collective pretence continues.

This is one shop in Madikeri. Almost everything you see there came on the back of a truck at the end of a long supply chain. With packaging, storage, wastage. All of it representing huge energy and material consumption, and value loss to the producers. …

30000 village clusters in India, in a sense (Going with 20–25/cluster). Local basket of needs — consumption — is 70–90%+ from outside the cluster. Even for the simplest basics. Local production is often down to a couple of commodities. Sold at sub wholesale prices. The deficit is crazy. Multiplied over…

“What can I do?” “What’s the point of policy changes if people don’t get it?” “It’s big biz that needs to make the big changes.” “Business needs to survive, we can’t change everything unless there’s support/demand.” “You can’t put at the individual’s doorstep when huge systems work the opposite way…